Jan 5, 2009

Sydney, Jan 4 (ANI): Commenting on Australia's cricketing woes after series' losses to India and South Africa, former New Zealand cricketer Craig McMillan has said that Ricky Ponting's captaincy is suffering from "the mediocrity around him."

Writing a column for the Sunday News, McMillan said: "Their captain Ricky Ponting is a great batsman and one of the best to ever play Test cricket. But when he was captaining the side with Shane Warne and Glenn McGrath in it, he was on autopilot."

"There weren't a lot of tough decisions to be made or forward thinking needed and Ricky has been found out recently. He hasn't been able to rely on those great players to get him out of tricky situations, so in terms of his captaincy he hasn't been as forward thinking or proactive as some of the other captains around the world would have been," he wrote.

McMillan also claimed that Ponting's men are reeling from dubious selections and the kind of rotten luck with umpiring decisions that have dogged opposition sides for years.

"Ricky is obviously finding it tough because he played right through an era where Australia have been unbeatable, especially in Test cricket," he wrote.

"There's no doubt that he will be finding it difficult personally. He's still performing well individually, but he'll be struggling to come to terms with the mediocrity around him," the Sydney Morning Herald quoted McMillan, as saying.

"He doesn't have that greatness in the team he once had ... and you have to wonder whether Australia have the depth in their first-class cricket that everyone talks about. It's fair to say that Australia's dominance of world cricket is over," he wrote. (ANI)